Text file Decryption....

As part of a test, I recived an Encrypted text file. I do not know anything about the encryption engine, except that it is "Home Made". My question is: Does any one know of a freeware/shareware prgram, that can try to decrypt text files?

Wht do you mean "as part of a test"? If I understand what you might be saying here, you are taking some class and part of an examination is to decrypt a message. Right? If so, I'd also assume that some part of the class is about encryptioin/decryption schemes. Didn't you learn anything about the various encryption techniques and what methods exist for breaking them? There are many methods depending on what you suspect the method used is and the content of the plaintext. If you know nothing about this, I'd suggest a good place to start might be Bruce Schneier's book "Applied Cyptography". It's an excellent indroduction to the subject and covers many of the most popular schemes in use.

jhance, your answer was very technical. However, my question pertained to locating software for decryption. I am not in any classes or schooling. I recived the file from a Programming fourm on the www. It was something that cought my attention. I was just looking for some decryption software that I could run it through. Where might I find a PGP (prety good protection) decrypter?

However, you will not be able to decrypt a PGP-encrypted text, unless you have the appropriate private key! PGP is virtually uncrackable, so don't even think about it. It wouldn't be called "pretty good privacy" if you could crack it easily, would it? :-))

If your text is not PGP-encrypted, you need to know what it is. Note, there's a difference between "encoded" and "encrypted". If it's encoded, it would probably help if you'd post a couple of lines of the text, so I could have a look at it and determine the decoder you need.
If it's really encrypted (in the sense of key-encrypted) and "home made", forget it. There's no shareware in the world that would help you. There are "password crackers" for known encryption algorithms (like DES), which you can use to guess passwords, but for example trying all possible combinations of an 8 character password would take your PC years to calculate, not to mention other password lengths. And if you don't even know the encryption algorithm, a password cracker is of no use to you.

Well, that text doesn't look like any standard encoding (like uuencoding or base64), so I assume it's encrypted and if you don't have the slightest hint about the algorithm used, there's no way to find out.
It could of course be a very simple XOR algorithm, which means every character is XORed with some other character, but it could as well be something completely different.

Cheer,
Schmox

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